Uploaded on 2017-05-03 by Frank de Gouw

Most of the times when I’m working on assignments or papers for courses at my university in the Netherlands in Nijmegen, I’m working in the central library. When reading task 2 about dependency on infrastructure I immediately thought of my own dependency when working on these assignments. Within such a library there are two things students are so dependent on, that whenever one of those things isn’t present anymore everyone will either leave or freak out. The first one is electricity. First, electricity makes sure that the computers (not visible on the picture) are able to work which enables students to work on them. Secondly it enables students to charge their laptops, thus making it possible for them to work longer in the library. If this electricity is working and computers and laptops are able to run, students are highly dependent on Wi-Fi and internet. The moment the Wi-Fi stops working, sources on the internet are not accessible anymore, you can’t work in your cloud anymore and save your progress and you are not able to send messages anymore. It is almost scary to see how dependent, in this case, students are on the presence of Wi-Fi. It almost seems that without it, we have no idea what to do anymore. Besides these online sources, we are also dependent on offline sources, in the form of books and papers. This distribution of offline sources is also a very interesting form of infrastructure, which seems to become less important with the rise of online sources, but still has a very prominent place within most studies.